From Lead to Sale: Proven Strategies to Shorten Sales Cycles

0:00It's very, very difficult to differentiate because I feel like there's significantly more competition across everything. There's more car makers now. It used to just be like the big three right now. Now there's multiple choices. You've got Rivian and you've got Tesla and, you know, and all these other car makers. And they're all making the same claims, too, about all of the things that used to be unique. Like Tesla could be where the electric car. Now everybody's got an electric car and, you know, and we're growth in scale, but everybody's growth in scale. And we've just got a book on growth in scale.

0:29You know, it's it's so I think that that the consumer is probably confused a bit. And so because there are more choices to make, more choices always prolong decision-making. And so they're just kind of overwhelmed. And then the second thing is I think it's very difficult to make a truly compelling offer.

0:55Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Business Lunch Podcast with your hosts, Ryan Dice and me, Roland Frazier. Ryan, how are you doing today? I'm doing really great. Just got back from a family vacation in Colorado where it's not swelteringly hot like it is here in Austin. And I know you. Oh, yeah. Not skiing. No, it's hard to ski. And but we did do whitewater rafting, which was fun. Yeah. Got soaking wet, freezing cold. Had you done it before? I did. Yeah, man. Like 100 years ago when I was probably a lot closer in age to my oldest son than I am in age to me right now. Nice. I bet you're very close in age to you right now.

1:38Fair enough. And what about you? You were in Jolio, London. Yeah, in London. We did our, what I would say is our very best Epic Network live. Basically, we have our mastermind that meets over there and also have a couple of people we invite to come. It was, it's always pretty small because the venues are fairly different over there, but we had, I think about 26 people and we closed a deal live, which was awesome. One of our Epic board members that had been working on a deal for, I think for two or three meetings was able to close it and they wanted to do it live. So they actually came into the meeting and scheduled it so that during the middle of our meeting, we closed the deal.

2:21So everybody got to high five and clean classes. And that was really cool. And we did an exercise that was basically just kind of a reach out to your network exercise, not asking for anything, just touching base. And one of the people that was there was in the middle of a raise and she raised an extra$200 ,000 in commitments while she was there just from that exercise. So that was like, it was just really cool. Like, you know, sometimes everything is firing and everybody's into it and on fire and it just goes well. That was how it was. So I thought it was especially fun because of that. very cool but yeah i was gonna i was gonna ask what made it different but you answered that that question so good good news too for all of you that are listening and watching we want to thank you um we cracked into the top 200 podcasts in the world out of all podcasts of which there are millions last week and um that that couldn't happen without you guys and so thank you all for listening and watching and tuning in and sharing this with your friends and reviewing we appreciate all of that stuff.

3:29Uh, and Ryan, thank you for, uh, for being, uh, you know, my cohost and making things happen here. It's, it's, it's really cool. He, Ryan texted me this morning cause I sent him a couple ideas and he's like, I finally have something to contribute. And I'm like that you like every week he sends me ideas for stuff. I'm like, you contribute all the time. So, well, I appreciate you letting me sidle in those. If you're a newer listener, this was a Roland's podcast for what, like years, a couple of years. Yeah. Yeah. You did it just like solo and interviewing people. And I was thinking about starting, you know, my own podcast for, you know, just to help support some of the other businesses.

4:01And it was like, why don't we focus on one? And that's what we've done. And, you know, changed up the format instead of it being an interview. It's just us kind of talking about God knows what, whatever's meaningful to us that week. And it's been cool to see people respond and like the format. Because I do think there's a lot of interview shows, man, it's just, they're kind of all the same. I know I get a little bit bored with it. Sometimes I just want to hear somebody else's take on something, even if I disagree with it. It's like just good to hear somebody's take. I think it's really fun. We're going to, we're going to try to step up our interviews.

4:34Um, so that we have kind of during the week, we've got, uh, you and me, and then we have, uh, an interview guest just to kind of add some of that to a little spice, a little spice, a little spice, but, um, yeah, that's really cool though. I, that, so thank, thank you all for doing that. We really, really appreciate that. It means a lot. And this week, I don't know if you saw what I sent you, but we were ranked, we were a little bit lower this week because you go up and down, but like the screenshot that I took, because you can only fit four podcasts on Apple's rankings into your, into at least what I used to look at it.

5:07And it was Business Lunch, Simon Sinek, Tim Ferriss, and Reid Hoffman, Masters of Scale. And I was like, that's pretty cool. You know, those guys are all people that, whose podcasts we listen to. And, uh, and so it was really cool. I'm sure that they ravenously consume ours as well. I know Reed especially is always like, Hey, send me another podcast. No, he's never done that, but, but it's cool just to be in that little grouping. So, um, that said, let's talk about something that will be actually of interest to people. And, um, I was thinking, um, do you want to talk about the slow growth thing first, or do you want to talk about, uh, one of the ones that I sent over?

5:48Yeah, because it's fairly new. I think I'm going to have more to share in the coming months, but we've got about 30 days on this test that we've been running. And I got enough data this morning to feel comfortable sharing what's going on. So I'll kind of set it up. The, we've been looking at our, at our sales data, not, not just at the scalable company, but really digital marketer across a lot of our portfolio companies. And what we're finding is that conversion rates overall haven't changed that much over the last couple of years, whether it's direct consumer and it's online conversion rates or, you know, more of a sales first motion.

6:25And it's, you know, people talking to salespeople, conversion rates haven't really changed. What has changed is the cost of acquisition of a lead and the time to sell, like from when somebody becomes a lead to when they finally buy like that. Just, you know, we're seeing those those get pushed back further and further and further. And so why do you think that is on the on the cost? I get it. Supply and demand and plus, you know, let's just say greedy Apple and Mark Zuckerberg and Google. But they do it because they can. More brands came in. A lot of, quote unquote, dumb money, throwing money at online ads, trying to figure it out.

7:06And those guys are in and out all the time. So they artificially push up the rates. You've got the loss of the third party cookie, which is definitely I'm seeing that affect lots and lots of people right now in terms of ad costs. I think that stuff kind of makes sense. What do you think is driving the time to conversion? Yeah, increased sales cycles in general. I think it is consumers just getting more graspier with their dollars, just people not wanting to part with the money. And I think a lot of this, we've talked about it 100 times. It's a function of interest rates being higher. It's a function of the government no longer giving out free money to everybody.

7:50You're seeing people's net worths go down. You know, in a lot of cases, the amount of cash they have in their bank account is going down. Just look at inflation. You know, let's say it's everything is 20 percent more expensive than it was this time two years ago. Well, unless your income has increased more than 20%, it's just costing you more to live. You have less disposable income. So I think it's higher interest rates. I think it's higher inflation. I think it's people running through some of their savings. I think a lot of people overspent and overinvested during the boom times and they didn't see the ROI.

8:26And so I think a lot of that's just coming home to roost. I think they're just getting more thoughtful. I think that maybe two other things that, because I'm not sure what we can do about that first thing, but the other two, and I want to get, because to me, these two things that you're talking about to start set everything up. But I think that one of them is that there is significantly more skepticism in marketing because pretty much all marketers are making the same claim. And so like in our space with scalable, it's we show you how to scale and grow your business. It's like, but so does everybody else.

9:04So it's very, very difficult to differentiate because I feel like there's significantly more competition across everything. There's more car makers now. It used to just be like the big three right now. Now there's multiple choices. You've got Rivian and you've got Tesla and, you know, and all these other car makers. and they're all making the same claims too about all of the things that used to be unique. Like Tesla could be, we're the electric car. Now everybody's got an electric car and we're growth in scale, but everybody's growth in scale and everybody's got a book on growth in scale. So I think that the consumer is probably confused a bit.

9:40And so because there are more choices to make, more choices always prolong decision-making. And so they're just kind of overwhelmed. And then the second thing is, I think it's very difficult to make a truly compelling offer because how, you know, it goes back to differentiation and all the choices. But if you're, you know, if you're selling water and there's 152 types of water on the shelf in front of you, why do I pick your water? Well, ours is made from hydrogen and oxygen. Oh, good. So is everybody else. Ours comes in a bottle. Ours comes in a plastic bottle. Ours comes in a box and says death on it.

10:18You know, I mean, it's, and that's a great example. Like, like how do you stand out water, liquid death? You know, how long does that last? I don't know, but, but it's niching down versus niching up. And so I think, I think those are things we can do something about. And so you're speaking to something we can do something about, I think, which would be that second class. Is it differentiation? Is it sales process? What is it? It's definitely more on the sales process side, because to your point, differentiation from a sales and marketing perspective, it's always going to have limited gains because it's out there for all to see.

10:57Right. So let's say you've got a truly unique mechanism. Right. Like that's kind of what you were talking about before. We've got a unique mechanism. We're doing something totally new that nobody's ever done before. Okay, awesome. But it's there for all to see, unless you truly have some type of defensible IP around it, patent, trade, you know, somebody else is going to do it. They're going to knock it off. Even if they are, they're going to figure out a way to do it. Messaging is not defensible. Like, they see you doing it. They can say the same thing. Like, so all of these things just get gobbled up.

11:27It goes to a conversation you and I have had several times. And I've watched it out there with people that we know. that, and it's kind of when I came into your world, you had War Room, which was a mastermind that was a marketing mastermind. It was primarily at that time around marketing hacks. And it was awesome. And I was new to the world. So I, you know, I sucked it all up and I was great. And I was like, yeah, we'll, we'll kill it with marketing hacks. And I think it'll be interesting to get your perspective on it too, because I think that's where you were as well. But over time, I think we saw that marketing hacks, because of what you just said, are only good until as long as they are secret and until they are adopted by enough other people to make them ineffective, which is very few, like maybe three more people adopt it and it becomes ineffective.

12:20So if you're building a business based on marketing hacks, or you've got a mastermind that's focused on, here's all the latest hacks. You are constantly on a treadmill of readjusting everything. And by the way, not all of them work. Not all of them are ethical. Once you dive into it, oh no, you can't do that. You can't. That strategy, when I dive into it, is not something that I'm comfortable doing. And so we have to build our business on longer term differentiation and longer term efficiencies that we can build. And, and I watch, I think my son who's over here was sharing something with me. And it's, it's like, I was watching a group of people that, that are kind of hack focused.

13:04And it's like the same people in the same place, frozen in time, their businesses haven't been able to grow significantly. They're making great livings. They're doing, you know, they're that all that's great, but you're not going to move up into the transferable value column of how do I actually get scalable if that's how you're building your business. So the thing you're talking about is something that isn't a hack. It's actually a long-term strategy that can effectively improve efficiency by closing the gap between the time of discovery and the time of conversion, right? Yeah, well, and because it's a long-term strategy, I want to just disclaim, I'm going to share it with you.

13:42It's not going to be as sexy as you might think because it's not a hack and it's not a trick, right? Right. And it's a combination of a lot of little things. It's not one thing that makes this whole process work. So, yeah, just to what you said, going back. What tool is it and what button do we press that makes everything together? Right. Yeah. It's this brand new software now. So just I'll tell you what we did, because I think it'd be helpful to go through the process. So we realized, OK, people were getting in a lot of leads. Leads are more expensive. we got to figure out how do we turn these leads into buyers faster so that we can get a quicker ROI so we can put it back in there so we can grow and scale.

14:19That's the problem that we're solving for. So the first thing that we tried is let's just throw volume at it. Let's throw violence at it, right? What if when a new lead comes in, let's emphasize speed to lead. Let's emphasize outbound call volume. And these are all inbound stuff. These are all, this is not cold calling. These are all people who we have permission to follow up with, but check this out. Because they said that basically, I think after five minutes, your chances of closing a lead that comes in live diminishes by about 85%. And that's what we've always heard. The data that we're seeing tells me otherwise.

14:54So in April, the team made 26 ,972 outbound dials. Okay. About 27 ,000 outbound dials to produce 152 sets, like to produce 180 appointments, 27 ,000 to produce 180 appointments. And then, you know, typically of those 180 appointments, the close rate was only about 10%. right so for every 27 000 people that you talk to you get 11 sales it was 17 yeah you get 17 sales yeah so um not they're they're 40k ish right yeah yeah yeah it's it's a bit but but what we were like this is awful and it's not you know it's it's it just isn't working so it's not sustainable either because how do you have a market like if you like you run out of leads pretty quick at 27 ,000 to get 17, right?

16:00I mean, that's, if your market is, even if your market is a million, it's not many months, right? Until you're like, who do I talk to now? The unsubscribe rate was through the roof. The complaint rate was through the roof. The spam, like every, it was also just, it's brand damaging, but we said, let's, let's test it. Let's just see. And look, y 'all, sometimes you got to just try something extreme because like, you want to be able to say, Hey, we tried that because this is whatever. It's all about speed to lead. It's all about, you know, more volume. You just got to follow up. You just got to throw more.

16:31So we're like, you know what? Screw it. Let's do it. Let's do it. And we did it and we got the data and it still didn't freaking work. And what we did is we burned out significant amounts of the leads. And when we looked at, okay, let's look into this, into the people that bought into the people that bought, how long had they been on, on the list? The average was still over 300 days. So all of that effort, and it didn't actually produce any more sales. It didn't actually shorten the sales cycle at all. All it sought to do was to completely and utterly alienate a lot of these brand new leads that we had.

17:06It was easily one of the stupidest things. Let me ask one data point, because I'm not sure we're speaking to exactly the same thing. When we're saying speed to lead, it can mean lots of things. This sounds like it's really a test, not of speed to lead as much as it is of volume, right? It was both. Because it was when somebody called in, let's say, how fast till they not set the appointment, but how fast till they talk to an actual salesperson? The calls were happening basically instantly. The lead came in and the reps are there. Within minute, they were doing a double tap. so no change so that so that was there that was happening i i i know how many people we have i find it hard to believe that that we were actually talking to people that fast this i mean i and i'm not i'm not doubting you i'm just saying they were the data is there i mean that that month we had 11 setters uh-huh so yeah trust me it was happening um it was absolutely it was absolutely happening.

18:11Now here, here's the thing. What we found is that of the people who actually bought, okay, the people that, that bought were not these brand new leads, but everything was about, let's try to get them to book an appointment if they didn't call right then and there. So, and by the way, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be still, you know, some speed to lead on, on some kind of new point, but, but we found that, that the, the faster that we followed up with them, that wasn't the variable that made the biggest difference. What made the biggest difference is the people who wound up buying had consumed what we would call one of our pieces of pillar content.

18:48They had actually consumed some piece of pillar content. So not merely them becoming a lead, but they had consumed some piece of pillar content. So we asked ourselves, and I think this is... Go ahead. And that goes with what I know at Epic we find too, the average, our best lead gen source or our best conversion source, I guess I should say, is the challenge that we do every month. And it's on average three challenges before somebody buys. There you go. And so we asked ourselves of the people that bought, let's go back and look at what was, what had they done? What were the actions they took? And, you know, we've got, we've got this data, we could go and look at it.

19:29And they had either consumed one of our pieces of pillar content, typically from a webinar that we do. Or they had come to an event, our live event that we held once a year. They had been to that and they had seen it there. And we asked them, like, how'd you know? Well, you know, I saw Ryan give this, or they had seen me give this talk somewhere, right? But it all came down. And this is the question I think everybody should be asking. What is the one piece of content that I wish everybody saw before we asked them to make a buying decision. And I think this is true for B2B, B2C. I think the only difference is the higher the ask, the longer the content likely needs to be because, you know, Google did the ZMOT study forever ago, the zero moment of true study.

20:14And they found that before somebody makes a buying decision, typically it's going to be seven hours worth of content over 11 touch points in over four different locations, right? That's still broadly the same thing that the direct mail association told us even years before that it's, it was seven touches before somebody buys this. hey, people don't generally just, especially if they're going to spend a significant amount of money and with all of the research that's available out online now, it's unlikely that you're going to be like, wow, look at that ad. Yes. Here's high, you know, here's thousands of dollars.

20:44Yeah. The, the advertising that you do, and I would argue the lead generation that you do, the, the purpose of that is not to get somebody on the list so that we can get them into a funnel or into a sales pipeline. The purpose of the initial lead generation, the purpose of the initial advertising is to get somebody on your list so that they can be exposed to your pillar content. Now, once somebody had consumed that pillar content, what we found was that the time to close that they bought was very quick, right? In less than 30 days. The difference is some people took forever to see the pillar content because in the case of scalable, for example, and we've seen this at Digital Marketer, the pillar content, maybe it only happened once a month, right?

21:28There wasn't the ability for somebody to consume it kind of when they wanted to. So I did two things. I took our best webinar that we had done. And so same thing in Epic, this could be the challenge. Let's say you're DTC, you're selling a lower ticket consumer type product. If you find that you get a lot of referrals, that's fine. What do the people say when they refer you? And has somebody else who would have some kind of authority said this as well? Maybe it's just somebody watching you know, a news clip that you were on and all this would be the ultimate like referral source. If only everybody could see that this person said this awesome thing about us, like, but what is that?

22:06What is that one piece? And this is important ungated pillar content. So I took the webinar that had done. I got it transcribed. Um, I then rewrote it as a 46 page report. Now that 46 page report is gated. You have to opt in to get access to it, but I recorded a YouTube video of me literally just reading the 47 page report. Now we're going to, we're getting this video updated and, you know, prettied up and, you know, and spruced up, but this YouTube video is 120 minutes long, but all other videos that I'm recording point back to that one video. The report points back to that video. The longer video encourages people to opt in for the report.

22:49All roads are leading to this one piece of pillar content. So we launched this back, you know, in the middle of May, got it out to the world and said, let's only follow up with the people who are on the other side of this. Number of outbound dials so far in the month of June. On the other side of it, how did you measure on the other side of it? Received or was there a way to measure consumption? There's not really a way to measure consumption on YouTube necessarily down to the individual level. If they opted in for the report, then we would start asking them if they want to book a meeting. Can't you on YouTube tell what percentage of the video they've watched and then basically change the marketing based on the percentage of video watched?

23:35You can, but you don't know who that individual is, so you can't expressly follow up with that person. And so we do have recarding. Right. But in just saying, we're not even going to ask someone to book a sales meeting until they've gone through and consumed. And this one video is just kind of one aspect of it. There's other things that are built in that are a bit more confusing, but not confusing, a bit more complex. But so far in the month of June, this month, outbound dials, 6 ,739. Number of meetings booked, 62. So it went from 27 ,000 down to 6 ,000. 27 ,000 down to about 7 ,000. the meetings booked went from 180 down to 62 but so far the close rate is over 40 percent so you have 75 roughly fewer calls and um then 33 as many leads and the show up rate on the meetings is so for first meeting whereas it might have been like 30 40 now it's 50 60 percent for the, and that's with like the initial kind of setter for the closers, it's over 90%, which 95, that was always pretty decent, but man, the close rate is through the roof.

25:00And so now what we're finding is we can bring in leads onto the list for a lot less money because we're not asking for phone numbers for somebody if they're just a lead. We only ask for the phone number if they're signing up for that pillar-gated content or deeper into the funnel. So our cost per lead has cut down in half. That's how we're able to generate as many top-of-funnel leads on half the sales. You have to wait a little bit longer, but the reality is we were having to wait anyway. So that's where this just kind of... And really, the wait is only longer for the first pipeline. Like if it takes 30 days to make that happen, that's only one time.

25:40like that's one 30 day wait and then you're back you know so and that's where like last month it was like when all this is getting built and people were getting put in the pipeline weren't really seeing the benefits um this month mega mega mega seeing the benefits so i think tactically like again the question we're asking is like what is that one piece of content that i wish that everybody could see before we ask them for the order getting clear on what that is creating it and then having a lot more of your marketing strategies instead of just saying let's get this person to an order form. You know, let's get them to a sales page.

26:12Let's get them onto a sales call. It's let's get them to consume this. But I think the biggest shift that we made is we made it ungated. It's just a YouTube video. Anybody can watch it. It's incredibly low friction. And then on the other side of the video, if they're invited to opt in, they're invited to book a meeting, the people that do that, great. So it is, it's classic less, but better. so funnel wise you're running traffic to the to the youtube video we are running discovery ads to the youtube video i'm now producing additional youtube videos that are shorter that also point back to that that we're running traffic to those as well just kind of dividing those so we've allocated um i want to say about 10 of our facebook spend over to youtube discovery ads to get that kind of flywheel.

27:03Okay. Are you driving people from meta to YouTube though? Because that seems like that could be a problem. We're not driving from meta to YouTube. We're driving from meta to very like tactical lead magnets. Like, so for example, the CEO scorecard, right? Here's a dashboard. Now somebody can opt in for that, but have no interest in working with us at this time. But, and so instead of asking them, hey, you got this, do you want to help implementing it, book a meeting? the show up rate on that was terrible. The close rate was even worse. So we're not even bothering doing that anymore. Now, if somebody's opting for the same.